Thursday, January 12, 2012

The Russian space program faced a massive and embarrassing
setback at the end of 2011 when their centerpiece Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars
got stuck in low Earth orbit shortly after launch, destined for a fiery
re-entry into the atmosphere sometime later this month.Now the head of Russia's space agency, Roscosmos' Vladimir Popovkin, says he knows what went wrong
- “foreign forces” interfered with Phobos-Grunt, sabotaging its
mission.“I wouldn't like to accuse
anyone, but today there exists powerful means to influence spacecraft, and
their use can't be excluded,” Popovkin said. His comments seem to echo an allegation made
by a retired Russian general back in November, shortly after Phobos-Grunt ran
into problems; he cast the blame on a high-power radar array operated by the US
military in Alaska.

Popovkin told Russia's Izvestia newspaper that “some Russian [space]craft had suffered 'unexplained'
malfunctions while flying over another side of the globe beyond the reach of
his nation's tracking facilities.”While
meant to blame foreign powers, Popovkin's comment gets to the heart of what
really seems to have doomed Phobos-Grunt (along with explaining several other
recent Russian space program failures), rampant cost-cutting in the Russian
space program.During the heyday of
Russian exploration during the 1960s, the Soviet Union maintained a network of
ground tracking stations and specially-outfitted communication ships so that
Russian space missions were in near-constant contact with Russian ground
controllers.Today that network is
gone.When something went wrong with
Phobos-Grunt, Russian controllers could only attempt to talk to the probe in
blocks of time just a few minutes long when it was orbiting directly over
Russia; Russian controllers later borrowed the use of a few radio-telescopes
around the world to better their chances of reaching Phobos-Grunt.

Today though the once mighty
Russian space program is being hit by budget cuts and a loss of experience as
older engineers retire, without younger ones to replace them.The result, predictably, has been a series of
mission failures during the past year.Still, according to noted space analyst James Oberg, “the urge to shift
blame seems strong.”

Mission Statement

Why A World View? Because I was frustrated by the lack of international news coverage in the American press. Sadly, foreign events usually only make the news when there’s a war or natural disaster someplace. But the world is more interconnected than ever, what happens on the other side of the globe can have a direct affect on your life. So I started this site to cover some of these stories missed by the mainstream media, and to provide analysis and context to others. And my goal is to do it in a way that you don’t feel like you need a PhD degree to understand what’s going on.